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Sixties activist Carl Oglesby dies

NEW YORK — Carl Oglesby, an activist in the 1960s who headed the campus organization Students for a Democratic Society and gave an influential and frequently quoted speech denouncing the Vietnam War and those who broke his “American heart,” has died at age 76.

Oglesby died Tuesday at his home in Montclair, N.J. Todd Gitlin, a friend and fellow activist who went on to write several books, said Oglesby had been fighting lung cancer that spread throughout his body.

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POLITICO 44

Born in 1935 and an undergraduate at Kent State University, Oglesby was years older than Gitlin and other ’60s student radicals he befriended and was living a much straighter life at the time he met them. He was married, with three children, and was working for a defense contractor. But while studying part time at the University of Michigan, in Ann Arbor, he was so disgusted by the Vietnam War and so taken with the then-emerging Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), and the society with him, that he soon became its president and most memorable orator.

“The only other person who compared to him was Martin Luther King,” Gitlin says. “He had the mastery of vivid phrases and also the power of mobilizing people.”

The SDS had been founded in 1960 at the University of Michigan, and its early declaration, the Port Huron Statement, helped embody the idealism of the early ’60s. The SDS supported civil rights and opposed the nuclear arms race. It was strongly critical of the U.S. government and called for greater efforts to fight poverty and big business. By the mid-’60s, when Oglesby joined, the United States had committed ground troops to Vietnam and the SDS had expanded nationwide.

The earnest, bearded Oglesby helped organize teach-ins and rallies, and his power peaked in November 1965 with his speech at a massive anti-war rally in Washington. In an address titled “Let Us Shape the Future,” Oglesby spoke as a disillusioned patriot and liberal who rejected not just the war, which liberals had escalated, but much of American foreign policy since the end of World War II and the free enterprise system he believed demanded endless conflict. He was equally critical of Republican and Democratic presidents, and insisted the country’s founders would have been on his side.